“I think the emphasis on employee engagement has been good for the quality of work life—and there’s a lot of evidence linking engagement to higher job performance.

But I think engagement is old wine in a new bottle. Engagement has cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. Cognitive engagement is attention and absorption, emotional engagement is energy and enthusiasm, and behavioral engagement is dedication and persistence. We already have a name for those states: motivation.”

Despite Grant talks about employee engagement and not about games, these two are tied with the need to understand motivation.

For this reason, we can conclude that gamification increases engagement by stimulating our motivational triggers.

However, the best part is, you know were increased motivation can take people – even to the moon. And, gamification could be the launchpad.

The following eight must-read books about gamification and game thinking will help you understand and apply gamification to increase motivation and engagement:

1. Gamify: How Gamification Motivates People to Do Extraordinary Things

Author: Brian Burke

Burke’s book is a fantastic opener to gamification. The book introduces gamification, game mechanics and experience design. For instance, Burke is resolute to say gamification absorbs people to act through motivation and meaning. Additionally, the book holds many great real-world examples from the corporate world.

2. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They can Change the World

Author: Jane McGonigal

One of our favorite gamification books. McGonigal explains the science behind why games make us better. McGonical showcases that games make us and the whole world happier, more creative and resilient and able to handle change better. She also points out, that different people like different games, but is adamant that the future will belong to those who can play, understand and design games.

3. For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

Authors: Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter

For the Win demonstrates the power of gamification, how it transforms businesses by increasing engagement and motivation. Werbach and Hunter tell how gamification can be implemented and give real-life examples from the corporate world. A great book for widening your perspective to think like a game designer.

4. Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards

Author: Yu-kai Chou

Gamification pioneer Yu-kai Chou tells about his twelve year long journey of obsessive research in creating the Octalysis Framework. He elaborates how to use the framework to create engaging experiences in products, marketing, at the work and in personal lives. Yu-kai’s book is perhaps the most advanced book on game mechanics on this list. In the book, he merges experience design with business and showcases how to reliably improve the return on investments and business metrics.

Amy Jo Kim says game thinking supercharges your progress in making products that people love. She shows a step-by-step system for creating those products and how to keep people loving them. Having being a game designer in games like The Sims and Ultima Online, she knows how people are glued to engage.

6. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses

Author: Jesse Schell

An excellent quality assurance book on game design. Schell presents over a 100 set of questions – lenses – for viewing game design. These questions hold persepective from a large variety of fields, like music, theme park design, mathematics, psychology, architecture, and anthropology. The book gives great practical guidance on creating world-class games.

3rd edition coming in January 2019.

7. Play to Learn: Everything You Need to Know About Designing Effective Learning Games

Authors: Sharon Boller & Karl M. Kapp

Games help in learning and are more effective than lectures. Boller and Kapp tell you how to implement, test prototypes and refine learning games in your teaching with loads of real examples of face-to-face and online games. As a bonus, there is an online game for you to play as you read.

8. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Author: Nir Eyal

Hooked is not exactly a gamification book, but it engulfs the reader on a journey of understanding what gets people hooked. Eyal puts forth years of his research, consulting and practical experience in gluing together products and people. He gives his four-step Hook Model process out to help product managers, marketers, designers and those who want to understand how products influence our behavior.

These books, and Ted Talks, grant a deep understanding of gamification and the connected fields, like psychology and behavioral science. By reading these books you will be on your way to understanding what makes people tick and stick. Read them, apply the knowledge and you will see increased levels of motivation and engagement.

Did we miss your favorite gamification book? Which is it, and why should it be on the list?

Peter, a sales executive, invited his sales team to a brainstorming session to the board room. “I want to see new solutions on how to grow our online sales”, said the invite.

15 sales experts arrived in the impressive boardroom and gathered around the massive oak table. Peter had ordered plenty of croissants and coffee to make sure people were at their best for a creative input.

Peter asked his team to shoot ideas, while one of the team members would write them down. While most of the group members stayed quiet, a couple of eager sales managers kept throwing in ideas. Peter reserved the right to analyze, evaluate and shoot down most of the solutions on the spot.

“No, that’s too expensive.”

“But, that just doesn’t work out, I mean, just consider it..”

“That idea is actually quite good, but it doesn’t work in this context, we have tried it before.”

Does it ring a bell?

I hope not. The scenario above may be stereotypical, but there are several mistakes that we have seen in “brainstorming sessions” over and over again. We don’t actually like the word brainstorming, because it is so often misused and deflated. But for the sake of common understanding, let’s stick to it, and if possible, try to reclaim some respect for brainstorming.

We have seen a couple of great articles around the subject, which we reference below, complemented with our own experiences of good brainstorming practices.

The list is by no means exhaustive, so please add your own ideas in the comments or on LinkedIn!

The ideas fall into three categories:1) Improving the brainstorming environment and setting

2) Using effective methods and processes

3) Enhancing the experience with facilitation and communication skills

How to improve the brainstorming environment and setting?

Go take a walk

According to Stanford University research, a person’s creative output increased by an average of 60 percent when walking. Additionally, it doesn’t matter whether you walk indoors or outside if your space allows it. Even standing up and little movement helps.

Brainstorm in a new location

Changing your regular project room or office space to another, perhaps in another city, lets you mentally prepare for it – and puts your mind to work on possible ideas before the brainstorming. It also helps in diminishing power positions held in your normal work environment. A new space can inspire new thinking.

Have a round table or no table at all

This is quite simple, but too many rooms have that great oak table in the middle. We prefer to not have tables due to tips 1 and 2 above. But if your approach requires something in the middle, then small round tables create an equal structure and won’t diminish shy people from speaking.

How to develop good brainstorming methods and processes?

Separate divergent thinking from convergent thinking

The goal of brainstorming sessions is often to come up with some ideas that can and will be implemented at work. For these types of outcomes, the process of divergent and convergent thinking makes sense. Divergent thinking is the action of generating a maximum number of ideas. Convergent thinking is the part of brainstorming when you start crossing out ideas.

Set a time limit for brainstorming

When you are doing divergent thinking, or brainstorming, set a time limit to it. This will create a sense of urgency and people will start blurbing out ideas. Some use a time limit of just 2 minutes, some use 10 minutes. What’s important to highlight here is that you can have multiple sessions and keep brainstorming efficient.

Re-frame the problem

The father of creativity – or lateral thinking to be precise, Edward de Bono, has said “You can’t dig a new hole by digging the old one deeper”. We tend to come up with the same idea no-matter how long we try to iterate for a better if we stick with the same issue every time we generate ideas. Re-framing is a very powerful way to start ideating if you are stuck. It allows you to look at the problem from another perspective.

As a practical example, if your brainstorming topic has been “how to improve our product” and you are stuck, try changing the topic to “if you had a magic wand, what job would our product do for the customer, and how would this improve our product”.

Brainstorm questions, not answers

Brainstorming for questions grants worry free brainstorming because it erases the thought that ideas should be good. Hal Gregensen from the MIT Sloan Leadership Lab explores this in his excellent HBR article. Use this for breakthrough ideas.

Draw or prototype ideas

Familiarised by design thinking, drawing or prototyping – or visualisation – can help you communicate your idea to others. It can also help you to see the bigger picture, especially from a practical perspective. This is almost a must when you start validating or testing ideas in the later phases of brainstorming.

Try silent brainstorming

Many brainstorming meetings are overpowered by who ever happens to be the loudest in the room. One way to give equal voice to everyone, is to actually shut up and write and draw the ideas. Just put a big piece of paper on the table or wall, write your brainstorming topic or question in the middle and go! Try some music in the background if you wish. No talking allowed!

Game on!

Play, is (naturally for us game-learning geeks) the go-to method of brainstorming. Games and play are a great way to unleash creativity. We use our own Insight cards in brainstorming (and networking settings) by distributing sets of question cards on the wall or on small tables in a space where people can move around (e.g. in trios). The question cards can be pre-selected from a deck of 50+ cards to guide the ideation. More detailed instructions can be found here.

How do I better facilitate brainstorming sessions and what are good practices of communication?

Don’t be the boss

Don’t put yourself in the position where you organise the brainstorming and have all the power to kill or endorse ideas. If you are, ask someone else to facilitate and try not to judge or impose ideas. Let people run free with the ideas.

Be a host

Invite people to the ideation like you would invite people to your home. Be a host to the good conversations. This will create a safe space, which is much more likely to produce creative thinking. More on the Art of Hosting conversations that matter.

Try out improv

Improv is a form of art that has originated from the theater scene, but is now commonly used in organisational development. It is about communicating in a way that does not stop flow, eg. changing negative sentence starts, like “No,..” or “But,..” with “Yes, and..” and about stopping the limiting of what the another person said or did. Applying the principles of improv in brainstorming gets people to share more ideas – because no idea will be diminished – and by building on top of ideas. We have worked together with Ralf Wetzel from Vlerick Business Schoolin sessions where we have combined improv and leadership simulations.

There are no right or wrong ideas

This is as simple as it sounds. The point of brainstorming is not to generate good ideas – or bad ones, but just to generate ideas. Therefore, there are no right or wrong ideas. Stating this in the beginning of a brainstorming session can help new people or introverts speak – as long as you walk the talk and don’t judge ideas.

Bring an outsider, a colleague or a customer to the brainstorming

This can create unexpected results and change the dynamics, when used at the right place and time. When people are new to subjects, they tend to simplify matters. And, on the opposite if people are experts on subjects, they tend to make matters complex. If you are brainstorming new product features, why not bring some customers on board!

Let’s brainstorm more!

Here you have 15 ideas to improve your brainstorming sessions. Let’s co-create some more! We’d be happy to learn and test out new ideas. We would be curious to learn, what has worked for you? Or what was the worst brainstorming you have been to? 🙂 What tip would you give to others?

2018 is huge year for education and EdTech. There’s buzz words like gamification, cross-disciplinary learning, innovation pedagogy, business simulations, machine learning (AI), virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and what-not in the air. This is the year we will start exponentially implementing new teaching methods to amplify our learning and growth.

Whether you are an HR-manager in the corporate world or a University lecturer at Stanford University or a startup implementing a world wide virtual reality learning platform, these are your 2018 top EdTech and education events to go to:

January 24-27: Bett Show

Location: London, England

Bett Show is the world’s leading education technology show, a place where hundreds of the most innovative education service providers and distributors gather. The program covers over 300 hours of workshops, talks and discussions addressing the most prominent issues in education, delivered by the people who are leading change and innovation. Bett Show has been around for over 30 years.

48 Forward is about inspiration, innovation, creativity and the responsibility in changing the world into a better place. A very important event considering that learning and creativity go hand in hand. Here you will also get to see what challenges will affect us within the upcoming five to ten years.

March 1-2: Corporate University and Corporate Learning conference 2018

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

A conference dedicated to latest developments, strategies and trends in corporate learning and corporate universities fields. Here you will also have chance to interact with the top leaders on these subjects.

SXSW features a variety of tracks from culture, technology, film and music. They also offer more opoportunities for learning, networking and discovery. If you go here, do your research first, its a bit like going to Slush; you can heap rewards if you reap.

The EdTech week in London runs from June 18 to 22 featuring over 30 events. These showcase what is happening now and in the future in the Education Technology. We highlight theEdTech X Europe on the 19th. Its Europe’s largest EdTech Summit that brings together executive level investors, innovators and industry influencers from European and international education companies.

Dare to Learn is a festival for rethinking learning. There will be loads of education professionals like pedagogy experts and psychologists. A fantastic place to make connections and ponder on the current and future implementations of, for instance cross-disciplinary learning or gamification.

Are you passionate about business innovation and creativity? Looking for a b2b startup with a scalable product? Come and work with us to multiply our international client base of businesses, consultants, facilitators and business schools!

Your role is to lead the business development of our web commerce and create key partnerships to accelerate sales.

You will work alongside the CEO and Creative Lead to craft the winning strategy to increase our brand awareness and improve online sales amongst business customers.

Our market is truly global so travel and good communication and language skills are a necessity. Experience of b2b sales in both digital and traditional channels is a must (business software, game-based learning, education industry experience a plus).

We don’t track work hours or where you work from. We track results and we have an office at the A Grid in Otaniemi.

We offer a position in a small core team of experienced people who are building a great company. We are very serious when it comes to delivering customer value and having an impact, but we are very informal about everything else. Remuneration depending on experience TBD – Let’s talk more!

Perks & Benefits

Flexible work hours and vacation: Morning person or night owl, this job is for you

Free coffee / tea: Get your caffeine fix for free

Located near public transit: Easy access and treehugger friendly workplace

It doesn’t matter which game we talk about, be it football, World of Warcraft or board games, all good games are very similar in terms of game traits and elements. Uncovering these similarities help us understand what really drives people to act, in other words, what are the things that motivate us.

Goals are what we strive for in a game, and it’s no wonder because achievement – making a goal – grants us positive emotions like self-worthiness and confidence. The goal might also be learning – discovering a way to solve a current or a future problem, or getting better at performing a task, which by default is very satisfying and useful.

2. The RULES (limitations on how players can achieve the goal).

Rules define the boundaries on how you can act and set the scope for the space we are allowed to dwell in. In other words, rules limit our behavior and penalize from, for instance a faulty tackle in football. Rules also give the players a common understanding of how the game should be played. In business rules can be seen, for instance when we are defining and limiting a scope of a project or a while trying to brainstorm for a new product that would fit the markets better. Redefining these rules – the scope – helps us to change the way we see how to achieve the goal. Rules make playing a game – as well as projects and ideation – simple and more effective.

3. The FEEDBACK SYSTEM (tells the players how close they are to achieving the goal).

Without a feedback system a player wouldn’t know where he stands – is he achieving or is he going the wrong way? The feedback systems give us actionable next steps toward achieving the ultimate goal and the feeling of being productively busy. This is at the heart of many games such as World of Warcraft. At work, we tick off items from a Things To Do list or follow the growth of sales projections in a game-like manner. In dialogue with colleagues, we get more complex feedback from others in subjects that can’t be defined in a tick-box.

4. VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION (everyone who is playing accepts the goal, the rules, and the feedback).

We’ve all seen the stick and carrot style of leadership die. There’s many researchers like Daniel Pink or Dan Ariely who have studied motivation and they point to intrinsic motivation as the ultimate driver. Of course, there are external motivators too. However, to play a game the players must intrinsically accept the goals, the rules and the feedback to be able to play the game. And, to continue playing a game we must also be motivated to do so. This motivation partly comes from the elements discussed below.

Bernard Suits (philosopher) says “Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”.

We continue playing when the game experience feels positive. To make a game experience feel positive it should include elements that spark positive emotions.

The 3 elements of a good game, by McGonical are:

1. Feeling of Fiero (pride, happiness, universally expressed by lifting the arms in the air).

Can be, for instance felt when accomplishing a next step toward a goal.

When you’ve been mentoring someone and they succeed in, for instance, in a negotiation due to that help, you receive this wonderful feeling of being important. In World of Warcraft this is an evident element, there higher leveled players help lower leveled players in harder quests. Just like mentoring, right?

3. Epic scale of the goal – the magnitude of the issue, which tells of heroic action (like saving the world).

Highlighting the magnitude of the goal or goals in a game builds up the amount of awesomeness we feel when we achieve the goal. This strengthens the positive emotions we receive and intrinsically motivates us. Jim Collins talks about Big Hairy Audacious Goals as an important driver from Good to Great.

A good game is a unique way of structuring experience and provoking positive emotion.

When you’re travelling, you visit new places and meet sometimes the most weirdest people. You try out peculiar food and listen to music that you don’t understand at all. It might be that you’re having pizza in Ho Chi Minh City with a local university student. But then, he tells you that it’s the first time he’s having pizza. You’ll most certainly then talk about food. And eventually, you’ll both end up with new recipes.

This is called knowledge sharing. You perhaps gave a pizza recipe to the local student and he gave you a family noodle recipe. This is how we learn from other people: by sharing knowledge.

However, there’s another side to sharing knowledge, and that’s creating knowledge. But, creating new knowledge is only possible when learning is reciprocal. This is because, if a person shares knowledge to another, only the other learns. In fact, this is common in classrooms where the teacher shares knowledge in a monologue style and doesn’t receive much back.

Now, to make new knowledge creation possible, we need to insert discussion and interaction. This contributes to making learning reciprocal. One example of inserting discussion and interaction in a classroom, is by changing the room layout to a round-table format. This would facilitate interaction – with such reasoning as diminished power positions and higher chances of accessing a flow state.

Just like with the pizza story in Ho Chi Minh, sharing and knowledge creation needs a common thread of enquiry. In our games we drive this enquiry through powerful questions that tune people in the same wavelength. (Most of our questions are not about pizza, in case you were wondering) In addition, our serious games, be it the board game or tailor-made gamified experiences, address learning as a reciprocal activity. It’s fundamentally so, because normally the players – executives, entrepreneurs, managers, consultants – have vast knowledge and life experience banks which make each player a teacher.

When we play a serious game, learning happens by sharing with other players. Here’s an example of how this happens during a serious board game. A question comes from the game, a person puts forth his ideas and another player gains an insight from it. And this is where the magic happens, he builds on top of the other player’s idea and bounces it back. The players bounce back and forth their ideas because it’s part of the game to contribute. A third person might build on top of that and so forth. And so we have built – created – new knowledge.

Sharing with other players has its other, besides creating new knowledge, benefits. Like that it builds trust and happiness from the enjoyment of giving and taking. If you are more into finding how sharing with others helps you to become successful, we suggest you read Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success”.

To round it up, it’s important to share knowledge, but it’s even more important to build on top of people’s knowledge. Do this by giving your perspective on the shared knowledge and you’ll be on your way to creating new knowledge. To make this possible in a wider environment, you ought to facilitate discussion and interaction.A couple possibilities for this are, for instance, changing room layouts and playing serious games.

Before going to dive in the actual sea during your first scuba diving course, you traditionally jump into a swimming pool with the dive gear and your instructor. Now, you go to the pool because you’ll want to test the gear. You want to do so because, perhaps, you are sceptic about the dive gear – “Can I really breathe underwater?”, but most of all because you are not familiar with scuba diving. You want to take the risk that’s involved with diving, but you’ll want to first do it with reduced consequences. There’s no waves, currents nor salty water in the pool. There’s no spiky corals nor poisonous creatures. There’s no visibility issues or depth- nor decompression limits. When you’re in the pool, all you need to do is stand up and you’ll be on dry land.

Serious games for business are what swimming pools are to scuba diving: platforms for taking risks with reduced consequences.

So, how do serious games allow us to take risks with reduced consequences?

In its simplicity, serious games provide a unique setup for personal expression – the essence of creativity and innovation. Serious games allow us to mitigate consequences there is in bringing forth, developing and choosing ideas in brainstorming, leadership and project meetings. In practise, this means you’ll be able to come up with more ideas. You’ll also be able to develop the ideas further with co-creation. In addition, you’ll be able to inspect and reflect more on the ideas with dialogue that surrounds the questions. As an end product, you’ll receive insights to solve and further develop your issue.

Now, why do serious games allow us to do this?

Gathering around a board game is like gathering around a campfire, you start telling the most imaginative stories. This is largely due to psychological safety. The idea behind psychological safety is that you are allowed to initiate without permission, and even if the action leads to a failure, you will not be, for instance, fired.

This idea that psychological safety is the #1 biggest contributor to innovation might sound silly. However, Google has done significant research about the characteristics of the world’s most innovative teams. The research gives the number one spot for making the difference in innovative teams to psychological safety. (You can check the other elements here.)

“Psychological safety is the biggest distinction in innovative teams.”

–Frederik Pferdt, Google Chief Innovation Evangelist

And, what does that have to do with serious games?

Well, the purpose of our games is to drive learning. And, if your mindset is set for learning, you can inspect and act a little more from a bird-eye perspective. This means that things are not personal. Thus, and since we are looking matters from a 3rd perspective – objective point of view -, we see ourselves and others as equal. This subsidises to psychological safety and ultimately allows us to contribute more.And, what does that have to do with serious games?

Further, our games are engaging by design. There’s elements of play and simulation. And, to borrow from our definition of play “being captured by flow in a creative and joyful act which is governed by fixed or thought rules “, we access a state that makes us both present, creative and joyful. This makes us the beforementioned, however it is the idea that actions don’t make an impact outside the room that removes failure from the equation. In other words, to play is taking risks with reduced consequences.

Serious games make a space that supports learning, removes boundaries between people, is engaging and simulating – and even encouraging. By so, serious games are what swimming pools are to scuba diving: platforms for taking risks with reduced consequences.

Be it from selling scuba diving on a beach in the Philippines as a 22-year-old-baby-face to pitching ideas at an entrepreneurship community, relating past experiences, be it mine or someone else’s, to my current context has helped me to see other perspectives.This has helped me to understand more and see a bigger picture. And ultimately, I’ve been able to make better decisions.

But, how do you, in practice, connect these experiences to your current context? Do you just have that apple drop on your head and puff you’ve had the insight?

You are right. There’s better ways. For one, mentoring, for another, serious games. There’s a reason for this. Mentoring and serious games allow us to connect the dots because they are both mindfully engaging.

This means that we embrace a learning mindset where mistakes and successes are opportunities – experiences – to learn from. Being mindfully engaged means to be pondering ifs and whys; about if this would have been the case, then what would have happened, and why it happened. As an example, a mentor presents tough questions that allow reflection. Mentors also share their point of view and insights from their experience. This allows the mentee to reflect on his context from a different perspective, which then improves the mentee’s ability to connect the dots, the experiences together. Similarly, our serious games bring forth dozens of difficult questions and reflection and insights from all the experiences of the players. This discussion and collaboration allows the players to connect those dots and makes reflection exponential.

Life teaches, goes an old proverb, however what life really does is give us something to learn from: experience. And, when you share an experience, the listeners gain new perspectives. By reason, sharing and gaining perspectives allows us to reflect on how other people see the world. Just like I’ve reflected on my experiences and gained new insights, when a question is presented during a serious game the players share their experiences and elaborate how they perceive the matter and build on top of each other. This way, the players create an exponential amount of new perspectives. And this is where the value lies. During a serious game, you create new knowledge by sharing perspectives. For this reason, serious games bring acquiring new perspectives and reflection to a new level. And ultimately, improves the player’s decision making.

During interviews, or even during regular chats with friends, I’ve noticed when I say something in a jocular way – to me that is – and the recipient eye rolls or doesn’t even flinch, I tend to think, “OK, perhaps he’s/she’s not in the mood, or didn’t sleep well”, and by so, I change the way I speak. In its simplest format, this is doing and reflecting, or to rephrase it, learning by doing. This kind of learning is infinite, meaning it is constant and it continues our whole lifetime. We do things, we reflect on what we have done well and what went wrong and, normally, the older we become the wiser we become.

Some of this action and reflection happens in the moment, however, we don’t always stop to ask ourselves the questions that take time and effort. I don’t mean to say that people are lazy, but the brain is simply built to save energy, and therefore it tries to make quick interpretations. For more on how our mind works, we recommend reading “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman.

In some cases, the action-reflection loop requires deeper thinking and feedback.

One way to improve the quality of reflection is to use dialogue and co-creation. This leads to more impactful insights and actions. And, as all the people who have played our games bring so much professional expertise and life experience to the table, it’s fascinating to see how they reach better and different insights together rather than reflecting alone.

To sum it up, the idea of our games is to improve the quality of the players actions by improving the quality of reflection and insights. We do this by serious dialogue, co-creation and teaching people to ask powerful questions. And, to ensure that reflection goes to action we provide players a tool called Insights Recording Sheet*.

Games, like most systems, can be designed to serve different kinds of ends. While some are purely meant for entertainment, some might be designed to sell things or to lose weight. Our interest lies in increasing the impact of learning.

The reason why games are a great vehicle for learning is that games are engaging experiences. In an engaging experience, the players produce dopamine, the hormone that will encourage us to explore and try new things – to learn and innovate, to phrase it differently.

We had a chat this week with our team about how this happens and what we know about learning in our business games. Here’s a TOP 10 list infographic of our findings. Enjoy!

P.S. If you have similar (or different) experiences, we would love to hear from you. Let us know if this resonates with you and how have you learned while playing (business) games?